The Duplicators

by Murray Leinster

Genres: Space Exploration

Synopsis

Link Denham needs a job. Any job.

When he's offered the position of navigator on board the leaky, rickety Glamorgan, he takes it without asking too many questions. The destination? A planet that has barely been contacted in two hundred years, in a dystopic system, isolated from the rest of the galaxy.

What he thought would be a simple job quickly turns into something far more complicated, as he finds himself embroiled in a complex web of treachery, double-crossing and alien politics. And what of this infamous machine the natives have, which can replicate anything put inside . . . ?

Murray Leinster was a prolific figure in pulp fiction, writing short stories and novels across many genres. The Duplicators is a science fiction romp in his characteristic style, and a wonderful example of 1960s pulp science fiction.

Release date: March 8, 2022

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 320

Sample

IT OCCURRED to Link Denham, as a matter for mild regret, that he was about to wake up, and he’d had much too satisfactory a pre-slumber evening to want to do so. He lay between sleeping and awake, and he felt a splendid peacefulness, and the festive events in which he’d relaxed after six months on Glaeth ran pleasantly through his mind. He didn’t want to think about Glaeth anymore. He’d ventured forth for a large evening because he wanted to forget that man-killing world. Now, not fully asleep and very far from wide-awake, snatches of charming memory floated through his consciousness. There had been song, this past evening. There had been conversation, man-talk upon matters of great interest and no importance whatever. And things had gone on to a remarkably enjoyable climax.

He did not stir, but he remembered that one of his newfound intimate friends had been threatened with ejection from the place where Link and others relaxed. There were protests, in which Link joined. Then there was conflict, in which he took part. The intended ejectee was rescued before he was heaved into the darkness outside this particular spaceport joint. There was celebration of his rescue. Then the spaceport cops arrived, which was an insult to all the warm friends who now considered that they had been celebrating together.

Link drowsily and pleasurably recalled the uproar. There were many pleasing items it was delightful to review. Somebody’d defied fate and chance and spaceport cops from a pyramid of piled-up chairs and tables. Link himself, with many loyal comrades, had charged the cops who tried to pull him down. He recalled bottles spinning in the air, spouting their contents as they flew. Spaceport cops turned fire hoses on Link’s new friends, and they and he heaved chairs at spaceport cops. Some friends fought cordially on the floor and others zestfully at other places, and all the tensions and all the tautness of nerves developed on Glaeth—where the death rate was ten per cent a month among carynth-hunters—were relieved and smoothed out and totally erased. So Link now felt completely peaceful and beatifically content.

Somewhere, something mechanical clicked loudly. Something else made a subdued grunting noise which was also mechanical. These sounds were reality, intruding upon the blissful tranquility Link now enjoyed.

He remembered something. His eyes did not open, but his hand fumbled at his waist. He was reassured. His stake-belt was still there, and it still contained the gritty small objects for which he’d risked his life several times a day for some months in succession. Those pinkish crystals were at once the reason and the reward for his journey to Glaeth. He’d been lucky. But he’d become intolerably tense. He’d been unable to relax when the buy-boat picked him up with other carynth-hunters, and he hadn’t been able to loosen up his nerves at the planet to which the buy-boat took him. But here, on this remoter planet, Trent, he had relaxed at last. He was soothed. He was prepared to face reality with a cheerful confidence.

Remembering, he had become nearly awake. It occurred to him that the laws of the planet Trent were said to be severe. The cops were stern. It was highly probable that when he opened his eyes he would find himself in jail, with fines to be paid and a magistrate’s lecture on proper behavior to be listened to. But he recalled unworriedly that he could pay his fines, and that he was ready to behave like an angel, now that he’d relaxed.

The loud clicking sound repeated. It was followed again by the grunting noise. Link opened his eyes.

Something that looked like a wall turned slowly around some six feet away from him. A moment later he found himself regarding a corner where three walls came together. He hadn’t moved his head. The wall moved. Again, later, a square and more or less flat object with a billowing red cloth on it floated into view. He deduced that it was a table.

He was not standing on his feet, however. He was not lying on a bunk. He floated, weightless, in mid-air in a cubicle perhaps ten feet by fifteen and seven feet high. The thing with the red cloth on it was truly a table, fastened to what ought to be a floor. There were chairs. There was a doorway with steps leading nowhere.

Link closed his eyes and counted ten, but the look of things remained the same when he reopened them. Before his relaxation of the night before, such a waking would have disturbed him. Now he contemplated his surroundings with calm. He was evidently not in jail. As evidently, he was not aground anywhere. The only possible explanation was unlikely to the point of insanity, but it had to be true. He was in a spaceship, and not a luxurious one. This particular compartment was definitely shabby. And on the evidence of no-gravity, the ship was in free fall. It was not exactly a normal state of things to wake up to.

There came again a loud clicking, followed by another Subdued mechanical grunt. Link made a guess at the origin of the sounds. It was most likely a pressure-reduction valve releasing air from a high-pressure tank to maintain a lower pressure somewhere else. If Link had taken thought, his hair would have stood on end immediately. But he didn’t.

The cubicle, moving sedately around him, brought one of its walls within reach of his foot. He kicked. He floated away from the ceiling to a gentle impact on the floor. He held on, more or less, by using the palms of his hands as suction-cups—a most unsatisfactory system—and got within reach of a table leg. He swung himself about and shoved for the doorway. He floated to it in slow motion, caught hold of a stair-tread, got a grip on the door frame, and oriented himself with respect to the room.

He was in the mess room of a certainly ancient and obviously small ship of space. All was shabbiness. Where paint had not peeled off, it stayed on in blisters. The flooring was worn through to the metal plates beneath. There were other signs of neglect. There had been no tidying of this mess room for a long time.

He heard a faint, new, rumbling sound. It stopped, and came again. It was overhead, in the direction the stairway led to. The rumbling came once more. It was rhythmic.

Link grasped a hand-rail and heaved himself gently upward. He arrived at a landing, and the rumbling noise was louder. This level of the ship contained cabins for the crew. The rumbling came from a higher level still. He went up more steps, floating as before.

He arrived at a control-room which was antiquated and grubby and of very doubtful efficiency. There were ports, which were covered with frost.

Somebody snored above his head. That was the rumbling sound. Link lifted his eyes and saw the snorer. A small, whiskery man scowled portentously even in his sleep. He floated in mid-air as Link had floated, but with his knees drawn up and his two hands beside his cheek as if resting on an imaginary pillow. And he snored.

Link reflected, and then said genially,

“Hello!”

The whiskery man snored again. Link saw something familiar about him. Yes. He’d been involved in the festivity of the night before. Link remembered having seen him scowling ferociously from the sidelines while tumult raged and firehoses played.

“Ship ahoy!” said Link loudly.

The small man jumped, in the very middle of a snore. He choked and blinked and made astonished movements, and of course began to turn eccentric half-circles in mid-air. In one of his turnings he saw Link. He said peevishly,

“Dammit, don’t stand there starin’! Get me down! But don’t turn on the gravity! Want me to break my neck?”

Link reached up and caught a foot. He brought the little man down to solidity and released him.

“Huh!” said the little man waspishly. “You’re awake.”

“Apparently,” admitted Link. “Are you?”

The little man snorted. He aligned himself and gave a shove. He floated through the air to the control board. He caught its corner. He looked it over and pushed a button. Ship gravity came on. There was a sudden slight jolt, and then a series of lesser jolts, and then the fine normal feeling of gravity and weight and up and down. Things abruptly looked more sensible. They weren’t, but they looked that way.

“I’m curious,” said Link. “Have you any idea where we are?”

The whiskery man said scornfully,

“Where we are? How’d I know? That’s your business!”

His air grew truculent as Link didn’t grasp the idea.

“My business?”

“You’re the astrogator, ain’t you? You signed on last night; I had to help you hold the pen, but you signed on! Astrogator, third officer’s ticket, and you said you could astrogate a wash bucket from Sirius Three to the Rim with nothin’ but a root-rule and a logarithm table. That’s what you said! You said you’d astrogated a Norse spaceliner six hundred lightyears tail-first to port after her overdrive unit switched poles. You said—”

Link held up his hand.

“I … er … I recognize the imaginative style,” he said painfully. “It’s mine, in my more exuberant moments. But how did that land me … wherever I am?”

“You made a deal with me,” said the little man, truculently. “Thistlethwaite’s the name. You signed on this ship, the Glamorgan, an’ you said you were an astrogator and I made the deal on that representation. It’s four years in jail, on Trent, to sign on or act as a astrogator unless you’re duly licensed.”

“Morbid people, the lawmakers of Trent,” said Link. “What else?”

“You don’t draw wages,” said the whiskery man, as truculently as before. “You’re a junior partner in the business I’m startin’. You agreed to leave all matters but astrogation to me, on penalty of forfeitin’ all moneys due or accrued or to accrue. It’s a tight contract. I wrote it myself.”

“I am lost in admiration,” said Link politely. “But—”

“We’re goin’,” said Thistlethwaite sternly, “to a planet I know. Another fella and me, we landed there in a spaceboat after the ship we was in got wrecked. We made a deal with the … uh … authorities. We took off again in the space-boat. It was loaded down with plenty valuable cargo! We was to go back, but my partner—he was the astrogator of the spaceboat—he took his share of the money and started celebratin’! Two weeks later he jumped out a window because he thought pink gryphs was coming out of the wall after him. That left me sole owner of the business, but strapped for cash. I’d been celebratin’ too. So I bought the Glamorgan with what I had, an’ bought a cargo for her.”

“A very fine ship, the Glamorgan,” said Link, politely. “But I’m a little dense this morning, or evening, or whatever it may be. How do I fit into the picture of commercial enterprise aboard this splendid ship the Glamorgan?”

The whiskery man spat, venomously.

“The ship’s junk,” he snapped. “I couldn’t get papers for her to go anywheres but to a junk yard on Bellaire to be scrapped. I hadda astrogator and a fella to spell me in the engine room. They believed we was going to the junk yard, but we had some trouble with the engines layin’ down, and she leaked air. Plenty! So when we got to Trent those two run off. They’re liable to two years in jail for runnin’ out on a contract concernin’ personal services. Hell! They didn’t think we’d make Trent! They wanted to take to the spaceboat and abandon ship halfway there! And me with all my capital tied up in it!”

Link regarded his companion uncomfortably. Thistlethwaite snapped,

“So I was stuck on Trent with no astrogator an’ port-dues pilin’ up. Until you came along.”

“Ah!” said Link. “I came along! Riding a white horse, no doubt, and kissing my hand to the ladies. Then what?”

“I asked you if you was a astrogator, and you told me yes.”

“I hate to disappoint people,” said Link regretfully. “I probably wanted to brighten up your day, or evening. I tried.”

“Then,” said Thistlethwaite portentously, “I told you enough about what I’m goin’ after so you said it was a splendid venture, befittin’ such men as you and me. You’d join me, you said. But you wanted to fight some more policemen before liftin’ off. I’d already drug you out of a fight where the spaceport cops was usin’ fire-hoses on both sides. I told you fightin’ policemen carries six months in jail, on Trent. But you wouldn’t listen. Even after I told you why we had to take off quick.”

“And that reason was—”

“Spaceport dues,” snapped the little man. “On the Glamorgan! Landin’-grid fees. On the Glamorgan. . .